September 27, 2009

Can 9 women have a baby in 1 month?

Well the saying goes that if takes 1 woman 9 months to have a baby, then perhaps there might be a way to construct an environment where 9 women can come together to have a baby in just 1 month. However, in this particular case, logic (or illogic depending on your perspective) does not apply (or applies in full).

I often think of this expression when forced to answer questions of product development — when a certain feature or capability will be available and so on. Whereas I do agree that adding team members can play an important role in overall growth – some of which is critical to maturing well (like an attentive support staff for example) – often is the not the key to success as this story would have us remember.

So when people are glaring down at you and wondering/requesting/demanding everything move at an incredible pace, you can simply look up and say “Sorry – it took my mom 9 months and I came out okay – didn’t I…”

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Comments

I can totally understand you. But I guess most people are nagging all the time not only because they favorite feature isn't there yet, but because there is no way to see progress.
It would be nice to hear about new future features more often…

I agree that we can do a better job at informing you all of new features that are being worked on and planned for in the coming weeks and months. That said, allow me to pass a few of those along now per your request:

a) An update to the Web-Access tool which will make it more usable and create the possibility for including additional features in the future (a few days)

b) An enhanced Status tab that will both serve as the SpiderOak application homepage and present high-level information on your backups, syncs, and shares (V 3.6 – next week)

c) Ability to pause items in the Queue (and thus pause SpiderOak operation) which will be available on this new Status homepage mentioned above (V 3.6 – next week)

d) Updated Billing webpage which includes ability to print an invoice on any transaction within your history – presented in the 'Subscription History' section (currently live)

e) Allow for selection of single files to both backup and share – a feature many have been asking about for quite some time (V 3.6 – next week)

f) A fix to the way SpiderOak works on Mac such that the application will no longer run in the dock (V 3.6 – next week)

g) Other optimizations and enhancements to the overall operation of the client (V 3.6 – next week).

There are a couple of other features not included above that we hope to include in this next release and we will keep you posted on the progress of them as well. Furthermore, we do promise to do a better job alerting you on planned features and functionality and sincerely hope you all will continue to submit your requests as they make sure we stay close to what matters most to you all.

Just like to commend you guys on an insanely ambitious project – all the platforms! all the linux distributions! all the power and flexibility and efficiency, across platforms, while remaining easy to use!

At first I was frustrated with some niggles.. But I am a sw engineer, and taking the scope of this project into account, I realized you've pulled off an astounding feat. Here's to your success!

Do you have the source code escrowed somewhere, in the event of an unplanned disaster taking out SpiderOak HQ? And could you make the window useable on the millions of identical netbook screens out there? :) (1024×600, I'm running Jaunty NBR)